The Angels and Giants Are Making Unprecedented Contact

Is it still cool to talk about contact hitting, or are we past that? I don’t think we should be past that. Not yet, not as long as the Royals remain the defending champions. So, you remember all this stuff. It was a big part of the Royals conversation during last year’s playoffs. Yeah, the Royals had a really strong bullpen, and an incredible team defense, but they wound up mostly defined by their insistence on putting the ball in play. For better or worse, that’s the association. The Royals were the contact team. As a matter of fact, they were arguably the best contact-hitting team since at least 1950. I personally don’t care too much about what happened before 1950, not when I’m talking about statistics.

The Royals are a loyal organization, so they brought back a lot of their players. There’s been a little mixing up, but for the most part they’re still the familiar Royals, so it shouldn’t surprise you they’re again running a low strikeout rate. It’s a pretty sticky metric, strikeouts. As much as the Royals have put the ball in play, though, they’ve so far been surpassed in that regard. Filter out pitchers, and the Royals have baseball’s seventh-lowest rate of strikeouts. They’re a little higher than the A’s. They’re a little higher than the Marlins. And so on, and then there are the two standouts. To this point, at least as far as not striking out goes, the Angels and Giants have been on another level.

This is really easy to look up. I know I’m supposed to play the part of baseball expert, but the following plot requires no expertise. Here’s a plot of 2016 team strikeout rates, limiting things to non-pitchers, since I don’t really care about how pitchers hit.

Our eyes are all probably immediately driven to the same place. You can examine that gentle slope if you like, but there toward the left, there’s a conspicuous cliff. That marks a drop of three and a half percentage points, and if you were a tiny decimal rolling down the hill, and then you rolled over the edge, that might be high enough to flatten you into a little black pancake. Good for the Cubs — they’re not striking out very much. That’s probably its own post. But the Cubs aren’t on the same level as the Angels and Giants. The difference between the Giants and the Cubs here is bigger than the difference between the Cubs and the Mets. (Go ahead and search in there for the Mets.)

In the post I linked above about the Royals, I calculated something called relative strikeout rates. Again, this is for non-pitchers. I found the standard deviation of team strikeout rates in the league, and then for each team I figured out a z-score separation from the average. The Royals finished last year at -2.48 — that is, their strikeout rate was 2.48 standard deviations lower than the average. That’s the lowest such mark since 1950 (at least). I repeated those calculations for this season. Here’s a different way of visualizing the plot above:

This puts the Angels at -2.26, and the Giants at -2.22. Those would count as top-10 contact rates, relatively speaking, since 1950, even if they aren’t quite on the Royals’ level.

But this year there’s just a bigger standard deviation. That’s a function of how early it is; the spread between teams hasn’t yet tightened up. But just so you know what’s been happening: last year’s Royals struck out 15.8% of the time. This year, the Angels are at 14.1%, and the Giants are at 14.2%. Just by raw strikeouts, they’re better at contact, the difference being the Royals’ figure is already locked in. The Angels and Giants have a long way to go, but it’s pretty clear they’re going to put the ball in play, very possibly at historic levels.

The Giants were good at making contact last season. So this all makes sense. The Angels weren’t bad at making contact, but their new front office made improved contact a priority. I should note also this isn’t just contact for contact’s sake — Giants non-pitchers rank third in baseball in wRC+. Angels non-pitchers rank a passable 14th. The Angels have by no means been a run-scoring dynamo, but they’re accomplishing what they’re trying to do.

On the Giants’ side this year, there’s been no Justin Maxwell. No Marlon Byrd, and no Andrew Susac, and while there’s also been no Norichika Aoki, it’s helped quite a bit to have Brandon Belt cut his strikeouts literally in half. No single regular player on the Giants has a strikeout rate above the league average. Hunter Pence comes closest, but no one will complain about his productivity.

The Giants have one regular who’s struck out less than a tenth of the time. The Angels have had two or three of those, depending on how you define the word. Chris Iannetta is gone, and the highest strikeout rate for a regular belongs to Mike Trout, whom the Angels are probably okay with. Kole Calhoun has trimmed his strikeouts in the early going. It’s worth noting that the Giants have faced a more strikeout-happy slate of opposing pitchers than the Angels, which makes some kind of difference, but both the teams have still been exceptional.

Of course numbers will change. Maybe some players will get hurt and replaced by more powerful types. It’s way too soon to say these are historically good contact-hitting lineups. But there’s no harm in observing where things stand at the moment, a month or so into the season. Relative to the league context, last year’s Royals were the best team at making contact in ages. This year, the Angels and Giants have struck out less often than them. That doesn’t mean any more than it says, but understand that the strikeout era hasn’t spread everywhere.